Social media marketing effectiveness should be measured by tracking key metrics like engagement, conversions, and traffic rather than just follower numbers. Engagement metrics to track include time spent on sites or applications, bounce rates, membership and interaction rates over time. Conversions like subscriptions, sales, or other goals should also be measured. Additional metrics that indicate brand awareness, loyalty, and virality can provide useful insights. Traffic sources and behavior on your website from social media should be analyzed using tools like Google Analytics.

1. Social Media marketing By: Evert Bopp Greenhouse Ireland www.greenhouseireland.com @greenhouseIre

2. Measuring your effectiveness

3. Follower numbers don’s matter!

4. So what counts then? Social media leads . Track web traffic breakdowns from all social media sources, and chart the top few sources over time. If members of your social media networks are sending referrals, consider measuring this data as well. Quality over quantity Engagement duration . For some companies, engagement duration is more important than page views. For example, if you have a Facebook application, how much time are social network members spending using it? Is per-member usage increasing over time? Alternately, if people visit your your company websites from SM (Social Media) sites, how long are they spending? (Also consider tracking which pages they visit.)Do your network listen to you? Bounce rate . Are visitors coming to your site from SM sites but quickly leaving? Maybe your landing page needs better, more relevant copy. Maybe the information they’re seeking isn’t easily found.

5. So what counts then? Membership increase and active network size . This is the portion of your company’s social networks (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) that actively engages with your social media content (e.g., Twitter, Facebook Pages, etc.) Is your collective members, followers, fans network growing, and is there interaction with your content? Activity ratio . How active is your company’s collective social network? Compare the ratio of active members vs total members, and chart this over time. There’ll always be some social network members who are inactive, but if you initiate a campaign to increase interaction, you should also measure the resulting data. Activity can be measured in a variety of ways, including usage of social applications. Conversions . You want social network members to convert: into subscriptions, sales (direct or through affiliates), Facebook application use, or whatever other offerings you have in your overall sales funnel and that can somehow be directly or indirectly monetized. (E.g., subscription to a weekly e-newsletter can be monetized by giving other companies access to your list in the form of advertising.) Measure all types of conversions and chart them over time.

6. So what counts then? Brand mentions in social media . So, you have a highly active social network and members are talking about your company or the company’s brands. Measure and track both positive and negative mentions, and their quantities. Loyalty . Are social members interacting in the network repeatedly, sharing content and links, mentioning your brands, evangelizing? How many members reshare? How often do they reshare? Virality . Social members might be sharing Twitter tweets and Facebook updates relevant to your company, but is this info being reshared by their networks? How soon afterwards are they resharing? How many FoaFs (Friends of Friends) are resharing your links and content?

7. So what counts then? Blog interaction . This is actually more than one metric lumped together. Blogs ARE part of an SMM (Social Media Marketing) toolkit, but only if you allow comments and interact with readers by responding. If you’re doing this, encourage responses either directly in the comments section of blog posts, or via Twitter. (Use a blog widget that allows this.) If your blog’s content is suitable for social voting (Digg, Propeller, Mixx, etc.) or social bookmarking (Delicious, Stumbleupon) sites, install a blog plugin that displays the necessary sharing “buttons”, then track referrals back from those sites.

8. Website traffic: visitors & page views.

9. Visitor origin

10. Clicks on short-links included in tweets, Facebook postings, URL’s etc.

11. Youtube metric: subscribers vs content

12. Measurement tools. Various measurement tools: Hootsuite, Twenty Feet, Twittercounter, Bit.ly, Backtype, Adobe Social Analytics, Klout, Peerindex. But also: Google Analytics, Google News alerts, tracking keywords.

13. Hits All this social media marketing needs to drive traffic to your website (your hub). So how do you measure that? There are a number of tools that let you measure hits on your website. But what do you track?

14. The number of visitors Where your visitors came from What they did Where they go to

15. Website traffic measurement tools Plenty of free ones! Sitemeter.com

16. AWStats

23. Google Analytics

24. Google Analytics

25. Wordpress stats

26. For follow up questions: [email_address] or @GreenhouseIrl